World History – TheGreat War (WWI)
Readings: The Armenian Genocide
Directions: Read each of the following excerpts about the experiences of the Armenian Genocide. As you read, highlight / underline important information. Then answer the questions that are listed at the end of the readings. You may write directly on this paper.
Reading #1:
Genocide against Armenians by the Ottoman Empire
A First-Person Account
(Excerpted from an account by Dirouhi Highgas in an interview conducted by William S. Parsons & Intersection Associates for a videotape production, Everyone’s Not Here: Families of the Armenian Genocide. Cambridge: Intersection Associates, 1989.)
Dirouhi Highgas was born in Konia, Turkey, in 1905, where she & her family were uprooted from their home & deported by the Turkish government in 1915. They were forced to march with other Armenian families to the outskirts or Tarsus. After months of starvation, beatings & killings, Dirouhi’s caravan arrived at a large concentration camp called Gatmanear Aleppo. From here she was forced into a train of cattle cars & sent to the killing center of Deir-el-Zor in the Syrian Desert. Dirouhi escaped death & today lives in Massachusetts. She has written an account of her experiences during the genocide entitled Refugee Girl (Watertown, Mass.: Baiker Publications, 1985).
People in the villages watched us go by… they were watching us. I’ll never forget how they were watching us. I felt so ashamed that one day I cried and I told my mother, “Everybody’s watching us and we’re just poor refugee people. We’re not like we were when we lived in Konia. We’re different now, aren’t we?” She [mother] said, “No we’re not different. You know what a diamond is, Dirouhi? Sometimes you put the diamond in the mud. But when you take it out, it’s a diamond. Nothing will happen to it. So that’s what it’s going to be like for you and all the rest of the Armenians. They think we’re just mud, but we’re not!”
It was wonderful [having my mother say this.] She was just trying to make me feel better because I was so full of shame. We looked shabby, you know; I was beginning to look terrible… We weren’t sleeping; we weren’t eating anything! So we traveled for another two days this way.
Then one day when we started early in the morning, there was no water in sight – no water in sight – and everyone was just dying for water… Then we heard someone hollering in the front of the caravan, “Water! Water!” And I remember [I looked up] and I could see a lake. The gendarmes [police officer / soldier] told us to stop the caravan so we could all go ahead to the water. But oxen have a very bad habit. When they see water you can’t stop them and when the oxen saw the water they just ran straight into
it taking the cart and all of us with them. And then they just layed down and drank. The oxen destroyed a lot of the wagons.
We stayed there that night on the outskirts of a town, but in the morning it was just terrible. Everybody was sick. Nobody could stand up. It was the water we drank. I remember my mother was so sick, my grandmother, my grandfather… Everyone had pains and dysentery… I remember thinking about all the same and how everything was erased from our world… What happened…
I’ll never forget that day. There were so many sick people and my grandfather thought we should get a few people and talk the gendarmes into letting us stay here a few days, at least just to see who’s going to die and who’s going to live. There was no way anyone could get up on their wagons. Everybody was very sick. The gendarmes said, “We’ll stay tonight, but we’re going to leave very early in the morning.”
The next thing we saw the gendarmes taking my uncle to throw him in where all the dead people were. There were hundreds of people who died that day from dysentery. So my mother said, “Oh they’re taking Stepan! They’re taking Stepan! They think he’s dead; he’s very sick!” My mother begged the gendarmes to please leave him here. “Just give him two hours” [she said] “and then you can take him any place you want.” So we sat there and he got better little by little… Everybody was getting a little better from the sickness. We [began to realize] that we’re not going to die – whatever left of us there was… There was no medicine. The gendarmes didn’t care whether you lived or died. They didn’t care.
It was a terrible thing to go through… Everybody was so sick and so many died. We left so many behind. I remember when the next day the caravan started to go, and I looked back and saw so many people lying there dead.
Reading #2:
Agan: Massacre of the Armenians
In April, 1915, 1,000,000 Armenians perished from the earth. That is three out of every four Armenians who lived in the world. They were pushed to the brink of extinction.
Armenians were Christians while Turks were Muslim. There had been conflicts rising since the Armenian rebellion. The rebellion made the Armenians perfect scapegoats for the Turks. One of the survivors of this massacre was Mariam Davies.
Mariam Davies was only five years old when this terrible incident took place. This marred her life as it did many other Armenian children. She was alive to tell her truthful story.
In early April of 1915 Mariam and her family, which included other Armenians, were rounded up. They were marched towards Agan which was called the march to death. The Turks randomly took people from their families and executed them. One of her brothers was a victim of this and they never saw him again.
The harsh conditions the Turks forced upon the Armenians during the march made it almost impossible for many to continue including Mariam’s grandmother. They had no choice but to leave her behind.
After the families safely crossed the EuphratesRiver they found shelter. Mariam was sent out to beg for food because her family had barely anything to live on. She returned and she couldn’t find her mother. She finally found her in the backyard burying her brother.
The next time she was sent out to beg she was captured by a soldier and taken into a room filled with Armenians. At the top of the room there was a small window. The people helped her up to the window and she escaped. The drop from the window knocked her unconscious. When she came to, she hurried home, but she couldn’t find her mother. She went along the river and found her mother, dead and afloat in the water. While she was crying and holding onto her mother, a man on horseback noticed her. He put her on the back of his horse and that was the end of her experience.
This is one of the many tales of the survivors from the Armenian genocide. To this day, the Turks will not admit that they were the cause of so many Armenian deaths. It is not until the now that the truth of the Armenian genocide is being reviewed. Let’s hope that the world has learned a lesson from this event and that history will not repeat itself.
Questions:
- What is genocide?
- Using these two readings, what types of experiences did Armenians face?
- How did non-Armenians respond to Armenians?
- Discuss some long-term effects of the Armenian genocide
- Have there been other genocides since the Armenian? If so, when and where?
- Do you think people should be held accountable for their actions? Explain why or why not.
- Can you think of any situations when a government initially lied about its actions then later admitted them? Explain.